Our transport correspondent, JEREMY CLACKSON, on how Mayor Perry’s pro-pollution, pro-car agenda has left Croydon pot-less, again
Clueless: Croydon Mayor Jason Perry
Croydon, under pro-pollution Perry, its elected Mayor, is the only borough in the whole of London that has failed to apply for new funding for cycleways while also failing to seek extra money for bus priority schemes.
Jason Perry’s pro-car agenda for Croydon – his costly PCN Fiasco notwithstanding – has been roundly criticised as “being clueless on what is literally a matter of life and death”, after a report from a London Assembly Member exposed the complete absence of any funding applications for important pollution-reducing measures on his watch.
Research by Sian Berry AM has found that while hard-working council officials in many other boroughs put in successful bids for funding from Transport for London, the boroughs of Lewisham, Brent, Greenwich, Kingston upon Thames and Croydon proposed no new funding for cycleways.
And they also discovered that there were no new proposals for bus priority from the City of London, Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Havering, Merton and Croydon.
While our cash-strapped council did bid – and get – money for “safer corridors and neighbourhoods”, they simply ignored cycling and buses. Camden got a chunky £1,475,000 for cycling, Barking and Dagenham got a whacking £2,715,000 for bus priority schemes. Bankrupt Croydon asked for nothing and they got nothing.
Berry report: the Assembly Member’s work has discovered Croydon’s not bothered to seek travel funding
“We’re outraged to learn that Croydon Council failed to make a bid to the Mayor of London for any new cycling facilities and we demand an explanation from the Mayor of Croydon, Jason Perry, and his Cabinet Member for Transport, Scott Roche,” said Austen Cooper, a member of the Croydon Cycling Campaign and part of the council’s Cycling Forum, back in the days when it actually had any meetings.
Piss-poor Perry, the “expert” on a Facebook group that appears to encourage vandalism of public property, is increasingly out of step with the mood of the people he claims to represent. While the number of cars registered to owners in Croydon is in decline (from 141,000 in 2020 to 135,000 in December 2023), Perry stands accused of “deliberate sabotage” of cycle schemes installed in the borough at huge public expense.
Perry has also failed to implement the council’s own Cycling Strategy, which has been abandoned.
“It makes a mockery of the Mayor’s manifesto commitment ‘to improving our local air quality in this climate emergency, because it is of national and local importance to take the urgent actions necessary to improve our environment in Croydon’ and ‘to developing policies that will help achieve our target of being carbon neutral by 2030’,” Cooper said.
“Safe, high-quality cycle lanes don’t just benefit people who already ride a bike. They provide transport choice to people who right now would like to cycle but are deterred by dangerous roads and intimidating drivers. They also enable people on mobility scooters to travel more easily, and allow delivery riders to get their goods to customers quickly and without fuss.
“The news about this latest council failure has stark implications for the weak efforts being made to improve air quality,” Cooper said.
According to its latest Air Quality Action Plan, “Croydon continues to exceed the air quality objectives for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) along busy roads [and while it] currently meets the particulate matter (PM10) and PM2.5 objective … it does exceed WHO objective … it is expected we would work towards meeting this objective.”
A Katharine Street source told Inside Croydon: “Perry is clueless on what is literally a matter of life and death.”
The council’s Air Quality Action Plan is, in reality, an under-funded set of feeble aspirations which the council cannot, or will not, do anything to bring to fruition: “We need to engage with residents and businesses to reduce exposure to air pollution and to raise awareness to change people’s behaviour by encouraging people to walk and cycle more,” the council’s Plan says.
According to activists such as Cooper, this is just not good enough, nor urgent enough. “We don’t need ‘engagement’ or ‘encouragement’,” Cooper said, “we need hard measures and the money to pay for them. Money the council didn’t even bother to ask for.
Pot-less as well as clueless: one of the charts from Berry’s report, illustrating the complete absence of any funding applications by Croydon
“That’s a scandal, particularly when temperature records are being consistently broken as the climate crisis gets worse.”
Assembly Member Berry’s report shows Croydon resoundingly among the “losers” among the capital’s 33 boroughs when it comes to allocations of funds to make travel improvements.
She said that there is a “looming delivery gap” in terms of the number of bus lanes, cycle lanes, safer streets and bike storage facilities being installed by the capital’s boroughs.
She said that the £65million awarded by TfL in 2023-2024 falls far short of pre-pandemic spending and risked leaving London Mayor Sadiq Khan unable to achieve a 27% reduction in car journeys that he has targeted by 2030.
On your bike: Tories across London embraced cycling schemes when Boris Johnson told them to
Current levels of spending were a “far cry” from the “Mini Holland” funding for cycling and walking schemes offered when Boris Johnson was London Mayor, Berry said.
But she identified a “lack of ambition” from outer London boroughs, such as Croydon, to seek investment. She said there was a “clear correlation” between boroughs having a lack of commitment to getting people out of their cars and their failure to bid for funds to encourage “active travel” such as walking and cycling or greater use of public transport.
Berry said that Mayor Khan had also failed to use powers available to him to compel boroughs to follow his transport strategy.
It came as the IPPR think-tank warned that “chronic underfunding” of active travel across England had left many people wary of walking or cycling. Only 1-in-5 journeys are walked or cycled, compared with one 1-in-4 in mainland Europe.
The IPPR research found that London spends £24 per person on active travel, while over the same period (2016-2021) it spent £148 per person on roads.
A Croydon Council spokesperson told the BBC: “We’re currently proposing to bid for over £500,000 of new bus priority measures for our next round of funding from Transport for London.” They also claimed, somewhat misleadingly, to have “delivered several improvements as part of our transport planning in recent years”.
“We have several trial schemes in place, and we are looking at other ways to support active travel, and are focused on ensuring we get those right, and making sure they are achieving their goals.”
For poor old, pro-car Perry, his public antipathy towards active travel is beginning to catch up with him. And it’s beginning to look a lot like blatant hypocrisy.
Having boasted to voters when seeking election that he would roll back some of the poorly implemented LTNs – low-traffic neighbourhoods – that were introduced during the 2020 covid lockdown, at this week’s council cabinet meeting, Croydon’s Mayor approved plans to make permanent six LTNs (now called “healthy neighbourhood” schemes) at Albert Road, Dalmally Road, Elmers Road, Holmesdale Road, Sutherland Road and Parsons Mead.
Maybe someone needs to consider placing a “No U-turns” road sign outside Croydon Town Hall especially for Mayor Perry.
In 2013, when the council was last under Conservative control, a local councillor declared his support for Croydon Council’s bid for TfL funding to transform the borough into one of Boris Johnson’s Mini Hollands, a Nirvana for cycling: “The council has a clear vision to seize these opportunities and make the metropolitan centre and the borough more attractive to residents, investors, businesses, learners and visitors, and cycling is a critical part of this vision,” they said.
“As regeneration and improvements are taking shape ‘Mini Hollands’ will provide the opportunity to ensure that we not only make the metropolitan centre and the wider borough a much easier and more pleasant place to navigate on foot, but that we also transform it for cycling.”
The councillor’s name? Jason Perry.
Read more: Perry has no plan to improve our borough’s toxic air pollution
Read more: Perry’s back-pedalling furiously on Boris-backed bike scheme
Read more: Tory minister is member of online group that celebrates vandals
Read more: Mayor Perry accepted hundreds of pounds of gifts in first year
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